theverge.com Archives - 25 April 2013, Thursday

Bitcoin has had a wild ride these past few months. The stateless digital currency’s price has soared to new heights only to plunge back down to earth at less than half its previous value. As the price of gold takes a nose dive of its own, some serious economists have risen to Bitcoin’...

Bitcoin exchange BitFloor is closing its doors, halting trading and announcing that it will return everyone’s funds. In an announcement on its main site , the company’s founder, Roman Shtylman, says that "due to circumstances outside [BitFloor’s] control" it "must cease all trading op...

Online dating giant OkCupid is the latest in an increasingly-long line of companies to accept Bitcoin for payments. The site has teamed up with Bitcoin wallet site Coinbase to allow singles to subscribe to its premium service using the digital currency. Other sites that have recently ...

After a self-imposed 12-hour halt in trading due to crammed servers, Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox attempted to get back in business today with upgraded hardware — but it didn't take long before things went wrong again. The site is currently offline due to what the exchange tel...

That staggering amount comes in a little less than a year, as the brothers are only reported to have begun "dabbling" in Bitcoin starting last summer. “We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler Winklevoss to...

Shane Todd. Photo courtesy the Todd family. "Mom, I’m going to call you every week," 31-year-old Shane Todd reportedly told his mother before he was found dead last June in an alleged suicide in Singapore . "If you don’t hear from me for a week, call the American embassy." It's possib...

Open-source currency Bitcoin is currently experiencing an incredibly volatile day — after reaching a daily high of $266 earlier, one Bitcoin is currently valued at $178, though pricing has gone as low as $150 as of this writing. That's a difference of more than $100, quite the roller ...

Users of Coinbase, a Silicon Valley-funded startup that offers some Bitcoin banking services, have become the target of phishing attacks. The booming virtual currency has grown into an increasingly appealing target for hackers , soaring from a valuation of around $13 each at the begin...

As far as preventing the attacks, Mt. Gox says there isn’t much it can do other than disconnect the trade engine backend from the internet, a partial fix that would allow selected users to continue to trade even if the site were hit with another DDoS attack. Mt. Gox's marketing manage...

Users who stored their Bitcoin in the system will be able to get the money back after a waiting period. The site will be opening a claims system, refunding amounts of less than 50BTC (currently around $6400) within 90 days as long as only one person makes a claim on it and processing ...

"Lots of people in the Bitcoin community chafe at what they think are silly, designed-fifty-years-ago government regulations that tell you what you may or may not do with your money," said Gavin Andresen, the lead developer on the open source Bitcoin Project that powers the currency. ...

Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency now worth over $1 billion , was designed to be as open and transparent as possible. Unlike traditional currency, you can download every Bitcoin transaction that's ever taken place and, more interestingly, tap into those transactions in close...

The combined value of all Bitcoins in circulation surpassed $1 billion this Thursday, as the exchange rate for each individual unit of the encrypted digital currency rose above $92. The milestone comes as the total number of Bitcoins nears 11 million and represents a huge jump from th...

Businessweek has a thoughtful and well-written defense of Bitcoin , the open source virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet. Writer and programmer Paul Ford points out that the Bitcoin experiment, so far, is working: it's actually being exchanged as money, and the unde...

Businesses using Expensify will soon be able to reimburse international employees in Bitcoin. The expense report company today rolled out support for the virtual currency, lending yet more momentum to the decentralized form of payment. Speaking to The Next Web , Expensify CEO David Ba...

After intense lobbying by a US Senator, the Secretary of State, and the US Attorney General , Singapore will conduct an official coroner's inquiry into the unexpected death of American engineer Shane Todd, starting on May 13 . Todd told friends and family that he was working on a join...

The community around Bitcoin, the fast-growing virtual currency that sustains an economy worth more than $650 million , has been shaken by what seems to be the first government response to its phenomenal rise. Yesterday the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of th...

The sell-off was precipitated by a glitch that prevented a newly-mined Bitcoin block from checking out with an older version of the software. Since each new block of the purely digital currency relies on the blocks before it for authentication, this created a fork in the chain — miner...

This is hardly the first online retailer to accept Bitcoins, but the Bitcoin Store is hoping to undercut the competition and keep prices lower than other Bitcoin stores. According to Bitcoin Magazine , the store is slightly undercutting retailers like Amazon and NewEgg. According to V...

Bitcoin's rise can also be attributed to the fact that the currency has remained relatively free from major security breaches. In September, BitCoin exchange BitFloor was forced to temporarily suspend operations after a hacker stole more than $250,000 in virtual money. Things have bee...

Shane Todd's girlfriend found him hanging in his Singaporean apartment six months ago, a sudden tragedy that local police deemed a suicide. But six months later, Todd's girlfriend, family and the FBI are still wondering what exactly happened. Todd had just put in his last day as an em...

These options were added thanks to the request of users — and Reddit does seem like the kind of community that would get behind Bitcoin. While credit card payments are only available in Canada and the United States at the moment (Reddit says they should be available worldwide by next ...

The controversial digital currency Bitcoin has a display at CES. It's a good-sized booth, featuring a giant picture of a smiling woman holding an iPhone running a Bitcoin app. Crystal Campbell, a waitress who works at an Orlando restaurant that accepts Bitcoin, greets curious conferen...

There's an entire industry of Bitcoin miners out there, people that set up specialized computer rigs to run 24 hours a day to mine the digital currency. Thanks to a 23-year-old kid from Brooklyn, this cottage industry is about to change. Yifu Guo, a digital media student on hiatus fro...

BitZino, another online Bitcoin-based casino that offers more traditional games like Blackjack, Roulette, and Craps, didn't indicate whether or not it turned a profit on its games since launching in June of 2012, but it did say that it paid out a total of ฿28,986 to users — that works...

The controversial digital currency Bitcoin has a display at CES. It's a good-sized booth, featuring a giant picture of a smiling woman holding an iPhone running a Bitcoin app. Crystal Campbell, a waitress who works at an Orlando restaurant that accepts Bitcoin, greets curious conferen...

Online gambling sites are turning their attention towards Bitcoin, with BusinessWeek describing how one site is letting US users pay with the digital tender following a huge poker site crackdown in 2011. Money never hits US banks at all, allowing the sites to operate without fear of r...

Bitcoin-Central is set to become the first Bitcoin exchange to operate as a real bank, thanks to new approvals from French regulators. Run by Paymium , Bitcoin-Central partnered with two French companies — the payment processor Aqoba and bank Credit Mutuel — to create a payment servic...

The total number of Bitcoins in circulation just hit 10.5 million, triggering a safeguard against inflation that was hardcoded into the digital currency. This means a drastic change in the number of new Bitcoins being created, which is expected to have a huge impact on the economy tha...

The anonymous online black market known as the Silk Road, which offers everything from drugs to pirated Red Bull, is back up after an outage that lasted about two weeks. When Silk Road became inaccessible earlier this month, the rumors started flying . Its psuedonymous operator Dread ...